Dan Letter

This one’s pretty straightforward: Dan Letter runs the world’s largest owner, builder and operator of industrial real estate. Prologis is especially gargantuan in Southern California, which includes the nation’s largest market for such property in its Inland Empire. 

In that region alone, the San Francisco-based Prologis says it owns 200 properties totaling 85 million square feet and servicing some 230 customers. It has another 3 million square feet planned in the region. There are dozens more properties scattered in and around L.A. County, too. 

Zoom out a bit, and the numbers get a bit unfathomable: 1.3 billion square feet across 20 countries, with nearly $3.2 trillion in goods flowing through Prologis’ warehouses in 2024, according to an Oxford Economics analysis. That’s equivalent to 2.9 percent of the globe’s gross domestic product. In the U.S., California led that GDP impact with $54 billion across what Oxford Economics described as direct, indirect and induced channels. 

So, yes, a very big player in what’s been one of the truly animating niches of commercial real estate since the pandemic. And there’s Letter, at the company since 2004 and its president since January 2023. In that role, he manages Prologis’ global real estate operations, its capital deployment and its partnerships with institutional players. 

What’s more, Letter is due to become CEO this January, succeeding founder Hamid Moghadam. Letter is understandably bullish. The company recorded $2.2 billion in revenue in 2025’s second quarter, up both annually and quarterly — and touted more than $900 million in development starts during the quarter, one-third of that related to a data center campus in Austin, Texas. 

“Given our scale, role in the supply chain and disciplined approach to our balance sheet, our future is very bright,” Letter said at the February announcement of his promotion to CEO.